Gio Ponti, the legacy of a well-rounded designer
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Specola handle | Incalmi Collection
Architect, designer, painter, cultural worker, lecturer, writer. Gio Ponti was a multifaceted designer who theorized, popularized and made at the same time: it is no accident that he is considered one of the great masters of Italian design. A restless personality, he was able to range between materials, techniques and disciplines in an extraordinarily coherent way. Merit of study, research, sensitivity and a design method that he applied across the board to achieve, in every sphere, shapes that carry elegance.
Portrait of Gio Ponti in the 1950s | Italy
CC PDM 1.0 DEED, via PICRYL
Author of some of the most iconic architecture of the postwar period, the Montecatini building and the Pirelli Tower in Milan above all, and founder of Domus, still a theoretical reference point for anyone wishing to approach the world of design, Ponti is indispensable to us above all for his commitment to the decorative arts and furniture. In the field of furniture and mass-produced object, the Superleggera designed for Cassina is iconic, a chair that Ponti took years to perfect, in a research whose outcome is an extreme formal synthesis.
In the field of decorative arts, making history is his collaboration with the Richard Ginori ceramic manufactures, which began in 1923. An artistic director of great intelligence, Ponti redesigned traditional motifs in a modern key, revolutionizing their iconography and beginning a new era for Italian ceramics. Far from citationism, his theoretical cue was the desire to instill new life to the antique and personality to the modern.
Gio Ponti - Pier Luigi Nervi, Pirelli Tower, Milan | Italy, 1960
Gio Ponti for Cassina, Sedia Superleggera | 1957
Gio Ponti for Richard-Ginori, Vase of Women on Flowers and Architecture, 1925 (Cerro di Laveno, Coll. Private)
The desire to overcome the precepts, and perhaps a certain coldness, of European modernism also finds fulfillment in the field of architecture with the concept of the 'escape house,' that is, a house where it is the freedom of behavior that informs architecture, and not vice versa. In the field of design, the signs of this 'escapism' are embodied in fabrics, glass lamps for Venini, and fire enamel objects made with Paolo De Poli.
Paolo De Poli in his studio | Italy, 1967
Ponti met the work of De Poli, a Paduan master of enamel on copper, at the 1934 Venice Biennale. The collaboration between the two is dated back to a few years later, with panels for the rooms of the rectorate of the University of Padua designed by Ponti and made by De Poli, and continued with furniture and small artifacts with the unusual shapes and bright colors typical of this technique. Ponti's experimentalism, through De Poli's extraordinary skill, has been one of our main inspirations
in our research on fire enamel on copper.
Incalmi, fire enamel on copper workshop
Foto di Matteo Lavazza Seranto
Speaking of De Poli in the introduction to the volume dedicated to him L'arte dello smalto, Ponti writes: "One verse is that of art, the other is the human one. And I cannot separate them [...] You know my theory: art is the expression of a man, and we regard it as such. Do we not say, for example, of an enamel object that "it is a De Poli?" or of a glass object that "it is a Venini?" And the thing extends to all the arts: it is always the testimony of a man." Of Ponti, this is perhaps the legacy we feel most alive: not design, but humanity. The idea that designers, artists and craftsmen are first and foremost people between whom a relationship is established, a relationship that animates the object, making it something more than a product: "an Incalmi".
Alchimie, Debonademeo design | Photo by Boris Bincoletto
Vetro made in Incalmi: l’esempio della collezione Alchimie
La texture di Alchimie rappresenta un’evoluzione della lavorazione del vetro. Il nome allude all’antico complesso di teorie e tecniche che puntavano a trasformare i metalli vili in oro. Ciò che accade in questa collezione è che la polvere di vetro, sapientemente lavorata, crea giochi di trasparenze ed effetti che danno al vetro le sembianze di marmi e pietre dure.
